Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.

Monday, 11 June 2018

Lay a Little Egg for Me

Today we visited some friends in the countryside who keep, among other things, chickens. They have a flock of about a dozen of them, and the birds are free to roam across a large corner of an orchard which must be very close to chicken paradise: nice cool shade from the trees with a few spots of sun here and there, all the food and water they can drink, lots of grassy areas to roam around in, and shelter from the elements.

But chicken paradise, it turns out, is actually something close to HELL: a dystopian nightmare of viciously and vigorously enforced social hierarchy from which nobody can escape, characterised by unprovoked and brutal beatings, theft of food, sexual assault, and constant unrelenting low-level bullying and violence.

Animals do not have morals. But even within that context, chickens take amorality to the extreme.

They are also probably the scariest non-dangerous-to-humans farmyard animal. They are, to all intents and purposes, miniature velociraptors, and the link to the dinosaurs is absolutely transparent and clear as soon as you spend any time watching them - the only thing they really lack is teeth. The chickens at my friend's farm spent most of the afternoon stalking and catching flies through areas of long grass in their little domain. Watching them doing this was like a case study in efficient predation. Those flies had no chance. Each chicken was like a T-rex, striding back and forth with constant twitching head movements until it fixated on a fly landing on a blade of grass, whereupon it would dart its head forward with such speed that not even a blue bottle could escape. It wasn't hard at all to imagine what the results would be if those birds were 8 feet tall and became interested in the taste of human flesh. They would be ruling the planet within months and we would be laying eggs for them.

I missed a trick with chickens in Yoon-Suin. Our modern domesticated animals are descendants of the Red Junglefowl, a wild bird whose range almost directly maps to the regions of the world which were its geographic inspiration. I should have done something with that. In a fantasy setting, a race of chicken-men could be like orcs: a being with a society that prioritizes only selfishness, where might makes right, and where the only respected value is the pecking order - literally.

Chicken-man
HD 2+2
AC 5
#ATT 2
DMG 1d4/1d6 (peck/gouge)
Move 180
ML 7
*Chicken-men can fly clumsily for up to 60' but need to land and then rest for 3 rounds afterwards.
*Chicken-men attack with a peck and a gouge from a taloned foot. They can instead sacrifice making those attacks in order to either:
1) Use both feet to trample and pin a human-sized-or smaller opponent to the ground; if they hit successfully they pull their target to the ground and pin it. This does no damage but in subsequent rounds the chicken-man can peck the head, doing 2d4+2 damage. The chicken-man will let go if hit and wounded.
2) Buffet with the wings. This hits any enemy in a semi-circular arc in front of the chicken automatically, doing 1d2 damage.

Have you seen the film 10,000 BC? There’s a scene where giant, flightless birds hunt the humans through a tall grass savanna. They are so clearly the evolution of the pack-hunting velociraptors of cinema fame (true velociraptors were fairly small creatures), and it very scary to see and ponder. Definitely something worth adding to your game!; )

I've got a big book of dinosaurs which is full of cool man-sized hunters like that. I never understood why Michael Crichton chose velociraptors as the main villains for Jurassic Park when he clearly could have used something else.

I've been around free-range chickens for most of my life, and yeah, there's a lot of things that are easy to miss if the only place you see a chicken is the dinner table. I've seen bigger ones chase down even small field mice and fight over them - they're only slightly slower than cats, and don't play around once they catch something.

There are a few curious things that I've noticed:1) The top rooster tolerates rivals, but won't tolerate a former top rooster; once you hit the top, if you lose even once, you're exiled.2) Old chickens that don't die become peaceful and monogamous, and move away from the main flock to become old married couples.3) Roosters won't tolerate lower-ranking roosters mating under normal circumstances; If there are too many of them, they start to share, and things go from 'amoral' to 'unnaturally amoral' very quickly.

They can get quite nasty, and particularly mean roosters will chase down even humans and smaller dogs. If there's an 'orc' in the animal kingdom, you've definitely found it. The second point brings up an interesting idea, in the context of chickens and orcs: The idea that an exiled chieftain, should he survive on his own long enough and gain the wisdom of age, might reach some sort of enlightenment during his wanderings, and just settle down in a small shack far away from it all.

This tangentially reminds me of the herbivorous warriors in Larry Niven's "Ringworld" ... a kind of joke/reversal of expectations in which the herbivorous hominids with flat teeth are the unstoppable warriors who require more land to graze on, while the sharp-toothed carnivores are poor peaceful hunter-gatherers being driven off the land ...

Tangential like I said, but implying a minotaur society that is warlike because they require the wide lands to graze on, rather than just being monster because. Cattle as monsters too, rather than just poultry ...

Herbivores live pretty awful lives, I think. They're usually much more sociable than carnivores but this seems to translate into a lot of bullying and fighting. There's definitely more legs in the herbivores-as-monsters theme.

Actually there are documented cases where herbivores did kill off their predators. One is where deer were introduced to an island and ended up killing off the bears. Even though the bears could have eaten the deer, they were still reliant on the berries that were found in abundance before the deer were introduced. The damn antler rats devoured the shrubs and the bears starved to death.

IIRC it was the same island where the deer population got so high that many found a new food source- fish. This was back when the alewives collected on shores of the Great Lakes, so there were plenty for the deer to eat.

So the herbivores became carnivorous omnivores that drove the herbivorous omnivores into extinction through competition for food. Isn't ecology grand?

Gallus Gallus 5/13 is the chicken mutant in both versions of Famine in Fargo. And in one of the Alternity fanzines there was a chicken with 6-12 pairs of legs, the result of genetic engineering for more drumsticks. Of course it escaped and the feral population eats humans.